“Don’t make me uncomfortable. You know why. You’re a good boy, I’ve enjoyed your friendship, and you’ve made me feel a part of your family. Why now? I’m ninety fucking years old. Don’t be thick.”
I sat for a moment, overwhelmed. I searched for words, but only found two. “Thank you.”
He smiled. “You’re welcome. Let’s not speak of it again.”
We enjoyed a comfortable silence. Kate didn’t bring coffee. She had lived in Finland long enough to know we wanted peace, not caffeine.
The buzzer rang again. Milo and Sweetness arrived at the same time. They were weighed down with packages. They looked at me and gawked. Sweetness dropped his armload of gift-wrapped boxes. “Damn, pomo,” he said. “You look great, but I wouldn’t have even recognized you.”
“You two laughed at me when I told you to keep a low profile, so I decided to set an example.”
“You did a good job,” Milo said. “You look so … young.”
They had to make three trips to get all the boxes into the apartment, and they piled them in the middle of the living room. They kicked off their boots and found places to sit. Arvid kept my new chair. Kate sat on the couch beside me, and Sweetness on the other side of her. Milo swept the house for electronic surveillance, then sat on the floor, in the middle of his treasure trove.
“Well, Kari,” he said, “welcome back to the world.”
“I never left it.”
“You came close enough.”
“Not really.”
Milo had on an exquisite new leather jacket. Must have cost a fortune. Our talk about anonymity must not have quite taken hold. I didn’t comment on it.
“Does anyone notice anything unusual about this coat?” he asked.
No one did, and he kept waiting, so finally Kate said, “Well, it’s very nice,” so he would get on with it.
“It’s custom-made to conceal this,” Milo said, and drew an antique sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from a soft and thin leather holster sewn into the coat’s lining. He handed it to me. It was the most beautiful firearm I’d ever seen.
“It’s a 10-gauge Colt Model 1878 Hammer shotgun. When it first came out, it was the most expensive gun Colt made. It’s a side lock, double-hammer, double-trigger gun with brown Damascus pattern barrels, blue trigger guard and break lever.”
I looked it up and down. It was covered in gorgeous floral scroll engravings. The barrels extended just past the fore-end, and the buttstock had been cut down to the pistol grip with such skill that it looked as if it had been designed that way. The modifications to the checkered walnut and ebony were the work of a master craftsman.
“When it was manufactured, it had thirty-two-inch barrels,” Milo said. “Before it was turned into this hand cannon.”
I passed it around so the others could admire it. “Can it handle modern ammunition?” I asked.
“No. It would explode like a grenade. I got everything so I can make shells just like they were in the 1880s. The same gunpowder, paper shell casings, wadding. Everything is perfect. Cut down like this, the shot pattern is wide enough to take out a room full of men with a single blast if I let both barrels go. But you have to be careful. If you shot it with one hand, instead of keeping the other on top of it for ballast, the gun would rear up and backward, maybe break your wrist and split your head open.”
My thoughts turned back to his apartment and his hand reloading outfit. When I was there once, he was loading shotgun shells with fléchettes, razor-sharp darts, instead of normal lead shot. In this weapon, they would cut a room full of men into fish bait. “Load it with rock salt,” I said. “That thing’s a menace. Even rock salt will tear through clothes and scorch the hide off somebody. Use birdshot at most.”